I can give you a trio of opposite-direction folks (TV to movies): Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore and Marisa Tomei. All of them started out on the soap As The World Turns.
I’m not sure you can say Skerritt “got noticed” after Picket Fences. His current career doesn’t look much different than his pre-Picket Fences one, which was still pretty mainstream (prominent supporting roles in Top Gun, Cheers, Alien). After, he had a huge string of made-for-TV movie roles, bit parts, and guest appearances.
David Strathairn was a highly recognizable “That Guy” in film for many decades before becoming Dr. Lee Rosen in Alphas.
You just broke my frakking brain.
David Strathairn has been nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys (won one), SAG Awards, and a BAFTA just to touch the highlights. He was slumming in Alphas: suggesting that that is when he “made it big” is just wrong.
Huh, wow. Admittedly I haven’t followed his career or even paid much attention to movies in general since 1994’s The River Wild. Good on him!
He was well-known on the stage, having starred in the improv group The Compass (its Hyannisport franchise) and The Apple Tree on Broadway. While the general public was mostly unaware of him, actors and producers knew him pretty well in the early-mid 60s.
**Shalhoub **really got to prominence with his role on “Wings” though, not that he was the star but he was a popular character on a popular show. Before that he only had a few bit parts here and there, not much that you’d call even a supporting role. Barton Fink maybe but even then, it came out in '91, the same year Wings premiered.
Megan Mullally really got to prominence on WILL & GRACE after a lot of small roles in movies – and after auditioning for the part of Elaine on SEINFELD.
They even lampshaded that on Scrubs, with J.D. wondering if Janitor and the actor who plays a Chicago cop in The Fugitive are one and the same person.
He first came on my radar screen with his recurring role as a boring-as-hell businessman who dated (and later married?) Rox on L.A. Law.
Which reminds me, Richard Dysart was in a gazillion movies before hitting it big as the patriarchal senior partner on L.A. Law.
Butterfly McQueen. The Best Supporting Actress from Gone With the Wind became the first Black person to carry a TV series, Beulah.
Nicholas Brendan was in a Children of the Corn sequel before becoming Xander on BtVS.
Fram Drescher was referred to as “the actress you can’t forget in the films you can’t remember” until she and then husband Peter Marc Jacobson created The Nanny.
Wasn’t that Hattie “Mammy” McDaniel?
Jon Hamm got plenty of small movie parts before MAD MEN made him a household name: he’s the square-jawed young pilot who obviously can’t do what Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones can in SPACE COWBOYS, he’s the Army captain who doesn’t have what it takes compared to Mel Gibson in WE WERE SOLDIERS; he’s the cop in a film with Ray Walston, he’s the skydiving guide in a film with Paul Rudd – they just needed a broad-shouldered guy to deliver lines with smiling assurance, is all.
Jennifer Garner had supporting roles in over half-a-dozen movies – she’s the other nurse in PEARL HARBOR, the long-suffering girlfriend in DUDE WHERE’S MY CAR, and so on – but didn’t hit the big time until after the first episode of ALIAS.
Although his name was mentioned in the OP, the film(s) were not: William Shatner in The Brothers Karamazov (1958) starring Yul Bryner.
There were lots of others, including my favorite Weird Cast movies, The Outrage, a remake of an Akira Kurasawa film as a Western (As they did with Seven Samurai and [io]Yojimbo*), mbut this time with Rashomon It has to be one of the most neglected films ever, which is weiord, all thinhgs considered.
Shatner gets the role of the Priest, a Preacher in this version. He’s aided and abetted by Paul Newman as an unlikely Mexican ()the Toshiro Mifune role), Claire Bloom, Lawrence Harvey, Howard da Silva (Ben Franklin!), and Edward G. Robindon (!!)
Shatner also starred in Incubus (Inkubo), the first film in Esperanto (!!!) Maybe his dramatic pauses sounded more natural in Esperanto.
Once there was a guy who got supporting roles on the big screen. A love triangle where the wife might leave her husband for a younger man? He’s not first-billed or second-billed, because – well, he’s the younger man. A comedy like RETURN OF THE KILLER TOMATOES, he’s the protagonist’s wisecracking buddy. You cast his cousin as the leading man in a heist movie; you cast him as the memorable cross-dresser.
Anyhow, you know as well as I do when things turned around for George Clooney.
Does Mark Harmon count?
He was top billed in a bunch of B movies before hitting it big with NCIS, but I don’t think any of them were terribly successful.
Oh, he just popped into my head.
Gary Sinise was a great supporting actor in Forrest Gump, Ransom, and a few other movies and then took off with CSI:New York.